Succession Planning isn’t about who’s next
Why the real work of continuity has nothing to do with naming a successor
Early in one of my interim engagements, it took me the better part of two months to feel like I truly understood the organization's financial picture. Not because anyone was withholding information, but because it lived so deep in the finance director's intuition that even she couldn't always explain it. I'd ask for something simple, a summary of how a particular grant's restrictions affected our flexibility, say, and she'd try to put it into words and come up short. We'd go back and forth, me asking questions, her reaching for language that wasn't quite there yet, until something clicked and she'd say, "yes, that's exactly how it works," or "I hadn't thought about it that way, but I think you're right." Some of it was so siloed between departments that I had to sit the program staff and the finance staff down together, in the same room, just to piece together how a single number actually came to be. The knowledge existed. It just didn't exist anywhere I could simply go and find it, not even in the mind of the person closest to it.
This is the moment succession planning is supposed to prevent, and yet when most organizations hear the phrase, they picture something much narrower: a single document naming a person, the deputy who would step up if the CEO were hit by a bus, or a slide in a board packet nobody has opened in three years. That version of succession planning is solving for the wrong problem, because it assumes the risk is simply not having a name in a folder somewhere. The real risk, the one that actually derails organizations, is not having a structure that can keep functioning without the specific person who currently happens to hold the knowledge.
Why This Matters More Than It Used To
The average nonprofit executive tenure is around five years, and in organizations coming out of a long-tenured leader, it's often closer to two or three. This isn't a temporary dip we're waiting out, it's simply the environment we're operating in now, and every sign points to it staying this way. Which means the old approach, quietly relying on one person's institutional memory to hold an organization together for a decade or more, no longer holds up the way it used to. If your infrastructure depends on tenure to function, and tenure keeps shrinking, you've built something that's structurally set up to fail on a schedule you don't control and can't predict.
I actually think there's something freeing in seeing it this way. It means the fix was never about finding a more loyal leader who would simply stay longer. It's about building an organization sturdy enough that leadership change stops being an event you dread every time it approaches, and becomes something you can simply absorb and move through.
The Reframe
So here's the shift I want to make, and it's really the thesis running through this whole series: succession planning is not a document you file away and revisit once a year. It is the ongoing, often unglamorous work of making sure your organization's knowledge, data, and processes live in systems that outlast any single person who happens to hold them. Done well, it looks less like a plan sitting in a drawer and more like infrastructure, quietly running in the background and doing its job regardless of whether the person currently in charge has been there twenty years or twenty days.
This is actually the same idea behind the leadership playbook I've written about in Transitioning Forward, the document I help interim clients build for whoever comes next. What I want to argue in this series is that the playbook shouldn't be something an interim leader has to assemble on the way out the door. It should already exist, built into how the organization runs day to day, so that it belongs to the organization itself rather than to whoever happened to be leading it when they left.
That infrastructure has a few concrete components, and I'll spend the next several pieces in this series on each one in turn:
Knowledge that lives in systems, not in people's heads
Metrics that tell the truth about the organization without requiring you in the room to explain them
Workflows that keep functioning even when the org chart changes
And because none of this happens by accident, I'll close the series with a piece on the role boards need to play in making sure this work gets prioritized and funded, rather than quietly pushed aside every time something more urgent comes along.
What This Actually Buys You
When I walk into an organization as an interim leader, the difference between a place with real infrastructure and a place without it is immediate. In one, I can find what I need, understand the financial picture, and start making real decisions within days. In the other, I spend my first month or two just figuring out where things live and how they work, and every week spent doing that is a week not spent actually leading. The same holds true for a permanent successor stepping into the role. A new CEO who inherits clear systems and a real playbook can spend their first ninety days building relationships and setting direction. A new CEO who inherits chaos spends those same ninety days doing archaeology instead, and organizations rarely get those ninety days back.
Succession planning, done right, was never really about protecting against the day your leader eventually leaves. It's about building an organization that was never actually dependent on any one person staying in the first place, and about making sure the playbook for whoever comes next already exists, long before you need it.
Julie Bluhm is the founder of Bluhm Forward, which helps nonprofit organizations navigate leadership transitions through interim executive leadership, organizational assessment, and board consulting. Learn more at bluhmforward.com